It is doubly romantic, this idea of a couple of detectives, linked by love as well as duty, devoted to each other just as much as they are to the truth. “There’s a woman with grit.” It is doubly romantic, the idea of a couple of detectives linked by love as well as duty
I knew you’d take him, but I wanted to see it.” One of the coppers laughed. “You damned fool,” she said, “you didn’t have to knock me out cold. Nora is too rich to worry about housework, but this insistence on the woman’s right to be considered an equal partner in marriage and in life recalls her affronted reaction when Nick, who narrates the novel, knocks her out to save her from a flying bullet. “Twenty minutes’ work after breakfast every morning keeps the flat going to perfection. That is what I keep saying all day long.” “Women’s sphere,” suggested Tommy, waving his hand. “I’m the person who wants something to do so badly. ‘And I’ll look after you,’ retorted Tuppence, resenting the manly assertion.” In the later story, A Fairy in the Flat, she makes her rejection of dull domesticity entirely explicit. In The Secret Adversary, Tommy and Tuppence are warned that their mission might be dangerous. Neither has much time for their socially allotted role. Tuppence is more active in the detecting business than Nora, but they share a spirit.
Nora Charles in Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man, which first appeared in 1934, is another detective fiction fan who escapes her constricted routine (and the burden of a large fortune) by supporting her spouse, Nick, as he sallies forth and solves a mystery. Christie was always good at writing self-reliant, intelligent female characters, but in making Tuppence a connoisseur of detective novels, she seems explicitly to be encouraging her female readers to identify with the character. In placing a married couple at the heart of the action, writers of the genre could involve women in their plots in ways that made them more than victims, sirens or a figure in the kitchen (which is where Mme Maigret is usually to be found). That of course is precisely the appeal of the thriller – vicarious danger. Shocking though that decision might seem to lovers of the books, it is in keeping with the spirit of Christie’s original dedication: “To all those who lead monotonous lives in the hope that they may experience at second hand the delights and dangers of adventure.” “‘Tommy, old thing!’ ‘Tuppence, old bean!’” That chance encounter is lost in the new BBC adaptation of the stories, which have been updated to the 1950s, by which time the couple (played by Jessica Raine and David Walliams) are already married but rather bored with their humdrum existence. On the page, Thomas Beresford and Prudence Cowley are childhood friends who bump into each other at the end of the first world war.
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